Tag: direct mail

… may be the lowly Post-It Note.

According to Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing Blog, using a Post-It Note to personalize a sales letter can make a huge impact:

In Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Robert Cialdini describes an interesting twist on the handwritten note. A survey was mailed with three cover letter configurations:
1) A printed letter.
2) A printed letter with a handwritten message.
3) A printed letter with a handwritten message on a Post-It note.

The response rate was a mere 36% for the plain printed cover letter. Adding the handwritten note improved the response rate by one third to 48%. The Post-It more than doubled the response to 75%. A second test to examine the possibility that some magic in the Post-It note itself was responsible for the higher response rate included cover letters with a blank sticky note attached. That approach generated only a slightly higher response rate of 42%.

Dooley’s thoughts as to why the note-on-a- Post-It technique worked so well make for interesting reading. Check out the full post here.

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I received a piece of direct mail today from Energy Trust of Oregon.

On the front it said “Light up the Savings! Free!”, with a picture of a compact fluorescent light bulb. On the back was the offer — fill out the form and get four CFL bulbs for free. There’s only one problem:

I’m not eligible.

The offer is only for households who “heat with oil, propane, kerosene or wood… If you heat with electricity supplied by PGE or Pacific Power, or natural gas supplied by NW Natural, you are not eligible for this CFL offer.”

Thanks, guys! I’m a NW Natural customer, so the only useful thing I can do with this particular piece of junk mail is burn it for warmth.

Perhaps it’s not possible to separate out electric-heat households from the folks who just buy electricity for other stuff… but couldn’t they at least have bought a list of NW Natural customers and cleaned those households off the mailing list?

Instead they paid to print the piece and mail it — with a real first class stamp, no less — to thousands of households who will look at the offer, find it appealing, and then learn that they don’t qualify.

In addition to the money they wasted on the mailing, they’ve lost some credibility with those households, who are more likely to look askance at the next Energy Trust offer.

It’s a shame… as quasi-public institutions go, Energy Trust is one of the good guys. But this is a case of direct mail gone bad.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.